personality disorder

noun Psychiatry.

any of a group of mental disorders characterized by deeply ingrained maladaptive patterns of behavior and personality style, which are usually recognizable as early as adolescence and are often lifelong in duration.

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Origin:
1935–40

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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Collins

World English Dictionary

personality disorder

—n
	psychiatry any of a group of mental disorders characterized by a permanent disposition to behave in ways causing suffering to oneself or others

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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American Heritage

Medical Dictionary

personality disorder n.
Any of a group of disorders in which patterns of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about one's self and one's environment interfere with the long-term functioning of an individual, often manifested in deviant behavior and lifestyle.

The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary
Copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.
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American Heritage

Science Dictionary

personality disorder

(pûr'sə-nāl'ĭ-tē) Pronunciation Key
Any of a group of psychiatric disorders in which a person's abnormal self-perception or ability to relate to others results in undesirable behaviors and interferes with normal social and emotional functioning.

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"The American novel tends to rest in contradictions and among extreme ranges of experience. When it attempts to resolve contradictions, it does so in oblique, morally equivocal ways. As a general rule, it does so either in melodramatic actions or in pastoral idylls, although intermixed with both one may find the stirring instabilities of "American humor." These qualities constitute the uniqueness of that branch of the novelistic tradi tion which has flourished in this country. They help to account for the strong element of "romance" in the American "novel." By contrast, the English novel has followed a middle way. It is notable for its great practical sanity, its powerful, engrossing composition of wide ranges of experience into a moral centrality and equability of judgment. Oddity, distortion of personality, dislocations of normal life, recklessness of behavior—these the English novel has included. Yet the profound poetry of disorder we find in the American novel is missing, with rare exceptions, from the English."

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